Sequoia
by coincident
Summary: Love is an armistice, or the end of one. MadaHashi/one-shot.


**A/N:** I hate proofing student papers. Have a story.

Because Uchiha Madara is a raging nutcase, but he got his act together long enough to found a village. That, in retrospect, is pretty damn good :)

Madara/Hashirama, because this pairing makes way too much sense.

Enjoy!

* * *

  
The _sequoia sempervirens_ is the eternal tree. It's a four-hundred foot fairytale, a legend embroidered in the laced stitchery of leaves, something sprung from the earth and posessed of a life of its own as no other living organism is. It's nature's own immortality, and not surprisingly, this of all its attributes is what Madara chooses to fixate on.

"Eternal, you said?"

"That's right."

Of course, 'eternal' in this case really means about three thousand years, but Madara is still young, and he sees immortality in the tree just as Hashirama does. He strolls toward it, hair afire with sunlight and stray leaves, and lays his hand against the bark as if issuing a challenge to the tree in its domain. Shadows miles above him appear as spiderwebbed patterns on his skin. Up, up soars the tree, and somehow, the creamy tilt of Madara's throat as he directs his eyes upwards has the same sensation of height.

Years in the future, and this is what Hashirama will see: Madara, one cool assessing hand against the tree trunk, and the moment of the turn—for there's one in every love story, isn't there?—when Madara glances back over his shoulder and sees him, and they tangle gazes like swords as the moment grows up, up around them, its own unfettered forest, veiled in a penumbra of golden light.

**~X~**

Madara is a seasoned warrior as only an eighteen-year-old who has known nothing else can be. Those older than him can remember a time without war, and this is ultimately their undoing—the fatal halt in the midst of seals, when the memory of a hearthfire or clean water strikes without warning—but this has been Madara's entire life, and his battle fury is a constant state of being. Now that the war is ended he seems unsure of himself, somehow brittle, and his discontent is a clear sting in the air when he sits at meetings or accompanies Hashirama on walks through the village.

Hashirama is a wood-worker, and so in Madara he sees not an enemy, but a tree in foreign soil. This is still new to him, as can be expected—but someday, he knows, he will set down roots, sink his fingers into the moist earth, and that day what he becomes will be worth seeing. There will always be unbroken soil in the beginning, the harshness of accumulated years, sediment of the centuries, deposits of poisoned water underground that will kill the greenery if it is forced. This he knows. This he understands. He will wait.

"A shinobi village," Madara scoffs as they sit across from one another, spearing pieces of meat with the automaton precision of men who know there are more important things to do. "Great shinobi do not grow from the woodwork—an axiom particularly apt in this case, as it were." A sudden grin, sin-slick and gorgeous and a storm uncharted on the ragged topography of his face.

There's nothing to do except roll his eyes at this, but Hashirama smiles anyway. He doesn't know where Madara picked up his strange pseudo-clever sense of humor, which remains the most surprising aspect of his personality—although really, there are many sides to this mirrored, flashing creature he used to call his enemy, all of which he's just now learning in a single whirlwind of reflections and glare. He's never really sure what to make of this peacetime Madara. For years now he's learned the way he favors his left hand in combat, the defiant sparkle as his chakra runs low, the whip of his hair as he falls to the ground—but now there are decidedly strange pieces of information to complete the picture: his hatred for dried squid, for one. The smirk as he makes what he thinks is a joke. The fact that his eyes, soot-grey without their bloodline, are perversely remarkable for their ordinariness. It isn't surprising that Hashirama finds these pieces of information much harder to negotiate.

"You are not amusing," he says, which is just the sort of inherently stupid thing you only say when someone is, as they both know.

Madara stretches back and interlaces his fingers, locking them behind his head. "There is no need to be so tense." This is what he does, a sort of parody of civilian interaction by following it exactly to the letter. "You have not answered my question. From where are you planning to bring these great shinobi to populate your…hidden village?"

"There are other clans." And this is true; Madara simply discounts them, paper dolls who crumble into flame in the blood-red light of the sharingan.

"So there are," concurs Madara. "However, I asked about _great_ shinobi. Not those too mediocre to—"

"These people are Konoha citizens," says Hashirama tersely. "I will not hear slander against them."

Madara tips his chair back, flagrantly disrespectful even as that silken voice spins its courtesies, and Hashirama realizes that this is a stalemate the likes of which they've never seen before: his wide eyes, and Madara's laugh, and the off-key clamor of his common sense as the corners of Madara's mouth turn up, up, shaking a few spring leaves to float over unknown water.

**~X~**

It's still jarring for him to see Madara using the sharingan for ordinary tasks.

"What are you doing?" he asks one day, and Hashirama shows him how he's knotting the fishing net, strong and supple for the queue of fishermen who are watching nearby. Konoha's rivers are small, but the Nakano has recently been found home to shoals of freshwater trout, which, while hardly a delicacy, still constitute sustenance of a vital kind. Trade with the water-bound Hoshigaki clan has been sporadic as of late, so Hashirama has been encouraging fishing as a local industry.

"How did you learn?" asks Madara warily, which is somewhat surprising, as this should be the point where he offers a soul-scorching glare and a vindictive remark and leaves to do whatever he does with his days, but instead he simply stands there and waits for Hashirama's answer.

"This is of my own creation."

And Madara's eyes narrow—sharingan user as he is, he has never trusted the idea of inventing one's own techniques, for warfare, or for life.

But this is a new world, and as of yet, it's still fresh as dew gilding the edge of a leaf. They've forgotten the rules here, spent time walking side by side, and that has its own effects on a person—strange effects, immeasurable effects, effects greater than years of facing one another in the moments of battle. Still, Hashirama is surprised when Madara kneels by his side and takes the net from his hands. The tomoe in his eyes spin, and this time, the familiar sight makes Hashirama laugh.

"It is hardly amusing," snaps Madara as his fingers, first shakily and then with perfect certainty, begin to navigate the weave of the net.

The Nakano burbles in its trench as the afternoon wears on around them, and Madara makes nets and hands them to the fishermen with his usual imperious pride. He makes the occasional unnecessary jibe, as Hashirama has come to expect—"My bloodline has enabled me to provide for you," "I'm not surprised so few were made before I arrived"—but there's something there, pale fingers skillfully knotting threads, the quirk of a restless mouth despite his best instincts. Hashirama hides his own smile.

Then an old fisherman, taking his net, claps Madara on the back without any notice at all and the sharingan user _freezes_, all teenage awkwardness and halted limbs, and Hashirama is about to go break up the inevitable nonsense conflict when Madara hesitates for a second and then places his hand right on top of the grizzled fisherman's shoulder.

Of course, Madara being Madara—and how strange, that Hashirama can say this, and know what it means!—the gesture comes out as a sort of terse whacking motion, but the man laughs his toothless laugh and tosses phrases like "fine young man!" and "credit to the leadership!" into the air, and Madara turns his head like a confused child and regards Hashirama as if to say, "Did you see that?"

"They liked you," says Hashirama afterwards, somehow gratified that he should have to explain this. "You helped them."

Behind Madara's eyes he can see the film of tense bewilderment—this battle-worn young man, wearing his family's fan on his shirt, mired in service for years and still helplessly navigating the labyrinthine intestines of his clan's distrust whenever he returns to the Uchiha compound. He will never show this, although Hashirama can see it already, how his back is simultaneously bowed and straightened without the weight of the battle fan in its bandolier. Appreciation is something alien to Madara, as he already knows—but for the first time, now, he wonders if it is because he does not know how to give it, or because he does not know how to receive it.

"I completed my duty, that is all," Madara dismisses.

"What duty would that be?"

"I will provide for my people," he says simply. Hashirama suddenly realizes the solemnity of this moment, its golden sheen like parchment, like ink on a contract—but before he can say anything Madara has already moved forward. The edge of his long shirt makes little wavelets as he kneels and begins threading another net.

This—this is alliance. This is the armistice Hashirama wanted for all those years: the ability to kneel in the sandbar beside his enemy and produce something other than destruction.

He sets his hand on Madara's shoulder and the other man tenses—and how is it, that he seems to draw the entire world into him as he does so?—but they have entered the sunlit cage of their armistice; the bars go up, up around them. The air in its potentiality is singing with second chances. Madara puts his hand over his. The war ends.

"Well spoken, my friend," says Hashirama, and Madara grins.

**~X~**

He builds houses for his village. The woods unfurl from his clasped hands—the seal for the mokuton has ever been the gesture of a monk kneeling at a shrine, oddly fitting—and in front of him, the hills of Konoha resolve themselves into civilization. Timbers, crossbeams—nature gives them architecture, he gives it expression, and the watching citizens burst into cheers all along the valley as the first row of buildings is completed.

Madara has developed an affinity for trade. Clan heads pour in from across the five countries to speak with him, and he receives them in his usual, mockingly formal way, the collar of his shirt turned up and his long hair flickering like the sound of laughter in the wind. Hashirama thinks that he likes this activity because of the lack of courtesy he can bring to it—all that matters in the negotiations are prices, demands, raw materials. As a clan head, Madara turns out to posess a startlingly refined economic mind. Hashirama remembers the lean years of the war, their dull scarcity, and he thinks of a thin teenager with wild hair, scrabbling to provide for his clan even as starvation carved its name into the birchskin of his cheeks.

"You are a more admirable man than I," he says one day, as they sit in his tent at the outskirts of the village and Madara flips pages in a report with utter disdain. He lifts his eyes for only a moment—he is still learning appreciation, after all.

"What nonsense," he scoffs, going back to the report. "The Grass Country is offering us a timeshare in their grain fields, but I believe that with some minor changes in the mokuton, we could—"

"How did you do it?" Hashirama interrupts.

"What, precisely?" Madara catches some of his hair and tosses it behind him, such throwaway elegance. Hashirama realizes with surprise that somehow, the war has made his old enemy a beautiful creature.

"How did you provide for them all?"

There are hundreds of Uchiha, he knows. Madara, like him, is only eighteen.

Madara considers this silently for a moment, then shrugs. "What must be done must be done. You know this as well as I do."

Then:

"I had a brother."

Hashirama remembers him only hazily, as if seen through smoke—and then he realizes he must have been, if he met him on the torchlit, fire-ravaged plain of the battlefield. He remembers a surprised and lovely face, almost feminine in its curves, and the long tied-back hair that was almost as wild as Madara's, but there is little else.

"What was his—"

"Izuna," says Madara.

"Izuna," repeats Hashirama, and stores it away. "What happened to him?"

Madara eyes him strangely. There is another folded moment, creasing in upon itself to hide its secret, but they no longer have need of moments like these. They are the founders of their village, and their lives are wound together, knotted, braided—mooring ropes on a vast, wooden ship. Hashirama waits for the answer, for he can now say with complete certainty that it will come.

Madara's eyes blur, spin, change, until there is a pattern in them that Hashirama has never seen before.

"Do you want to know?" he asks.

**~X~**

He learns.

He learns of starvation, militancy taking the place of common sense, and of an eighteen-year-old with wild hair who fought with the madness of a beast to bring his clan bread and water and clean air to breathe. He learns of the sickness that ravaged his enemy's body during those years, that left gaping craters under his eyes and leeched the color from his skin, and the will that burned brightly even as his clan turned him away. He learns of Uchiha Izuna and the sacrifice. He learns of those eyes, eyes that do not waver while recounting these things, trained as they are on something he cannot and will never see.

"Your people will not go hungry again," he says to Madara, as they stand on the pier at the Nakano Delta's small port and watch the boats come in. "I will make sure of it."

Madara does not react to this. His eyes are focused out over the water, where the Water Country traders have moored their crafts and are unloading goods onto the dock. From their vantage point, they can hear a man say "You are welcome to Konoha!" It's a feeling that heats Hashirama through and through, like stepping into a warm room from the cold and feeling his veins alight with comfort, with validation. Madara leans on the wooden railing and rests his chin on his wrist. His entire body is relaxed but for his eyes, two points of wary, assessing light in that elegant frame, and Hashirama thinks that if he were to make a statue for this pier, he would make it of Madara as he is now, all his beauty and feral energy focused on his village and the people who have made it.

"They are shortchanging them," he says absently. "I will have words. There must be a proper treasury established immediately—"

"Did you hear me?" says Hashirama. "I want to provide for your people. They are mine as well now."

"You sound like a man with a young wife," says Madara, sounding displeased, and Hashirama laughs.

"We are something like that," he says, spurred on by the perfection of the vista, by Madara's eyes looking at something they both can see. "For we have given birth to something, and it is just as weak as a newborn child, as of yet!"

"If that is the case, then you are the wife," says Madara crossly, and perhaps it is this that makes Hashirama chuckle and take his hand, its bones trim and clean as those of a bird, but the skin warm and flush against his, tangible in a way he has never felt it before. He doesn't know what it is. But Madara doesn't remove it, and he knows that this is what makes him clasp it more tightly between his fingers.

How far they have come, he and this boy with distrustful eyes, far enough to create something out of the battlefield they made of the world. How far they have yet to go. So many paths unfurl in front of them, a great net of golden roads weaving in and out of each other, sparkling as they cross, leading to pastures unseen and fields with a diamond yield, if they only take the time to plow them together. The future he sees at that moment is so strong, so true that he can't help but catch his breath, and when Madara raises his eyes to his, up, up, questioning, eternally curious, Hashirama smiles.

They have come far, and they will go farther. They are the greatest of their generation, and it will never be far enough.

**~X~**

Madara's eyes are most beautiful when their distrustful look leaves them and they melt into the cool, lovely haze they might have always been had it not been for the war, and the years, and the feeling of his brother's blood on his hands. It's still surprising to Hashirama to trace the scars he has left on his enemy's body and see them beneath him on that pale skin. The firelight makes the air around them into a heavy curtain. Madara's body is a pearl waiting for a touch. Hashirama guides his mouth over the calloused hands, the tense shoulders, the proud neck, and Madara fists his hands in his long dark hair and pulls his head up, up—and it is here, the last battle before the true armistice: one in which they meet, perhaps, as they were always meant to meet.

Roots are put down into wakening earth. The new season breaks upon Konoha with a sound like birdsong, like laughing water in the rivers, like Madara's low voice in his ear, and Hashirama closes his eyes and climbs up, up, _up_—into a peace that is as golden as the sun.

**~X~**

The cheers at Konoha's inaugaration are like the sound of their hands clasping together at the end of the war.

Here, the tree has grown into a forest, and Hashirama can see the canopy of sky above them like branches gilded in benevolent sunlight. Below them in the valley are chains of houses, fledgling families like birds nesting, shouts of joy as children run in the streets they made. The years of the war are erased with every moment that passes. Hashirama laughs freely with his citizens. History writes in glowing letters the name of their village—_Konoha_, Konoha, Konoha—and so, also, their own names, together.

He stands on the mountain and forms the seals to make the last tree in their landscape, and then he catches sight of Madara standing amid the cluster of Uchiha to the left-hand side of the crowd. Their eyes meet, for they are equals, and as water seeks its level, so they will always find one another.

"Madara," he calls.

His old enemy's eyes widen—it's the first time he's ever said his name, and the sound is surprising, but not sad. There is hope in it. There is a sound like the wind rustling summer leaves. There is a sound like a door opening. There is a sound that he wants to hear and wants to say for the rest of his life. Hashirama says it again.

"Madara. Come here."

And Madara disengages himself from his family and comes to stand beside him. They face each other for the last time, and then, in front of all the watching world, Hashirama takes his enemy's wrist and places his hand gently, but firmly against the dirt.

"Thank you," he says, and for once Madara has nothing to say.

The jutsu is easier then than it has ever been. From their joined hands, the sequoia begins to grow. For a moment it flounders, shaking its young leaves tremulously, but then it gains momentum and ricochets up, up, until every man, woman, and child in Konoha is watching its heedless journey. Its rings expand as they watch, bark layering it and coating it and disapearing under new layers with the timeless resurgence of nature, the joy of creation and of rebirth—and still it grows, until it is higher than any of them could have imagined and higher still than that, until it is a pillar that supports the sky itself, until it is a monument like nothing man could ever have made, but they have made it; they have _tamed _it, and that is what they have done with their armistice.

In less than a few days, there will be a dispute over the position of Hokage. An old hatred will kindle like a blaze and incinerate the timbers they have laid over the village, and Hashirama will be helpless against the rage Madara will unleash. An eighteen-year-old with a dream will become an immortal with a grudge. A legend will burn like so much firewood. An era will end. Madara will leave as he came: suddenly, with the force of a tempest. Neither of them will mention this moment again.

Both of them, however, will remember it.

"We made this," Hashirama says to Madara, and the Uchiha clan head turns to him. In his face, Hashirama can see the peace they have built with as much toil and sweat and pride as the houses and the village below them. Madara smiles without a trace of cynicism.

"Yes," he says. "We did."

Up, up grows the sequoia, and for that moment, Konoha is as it should be.

**~X~**

_end_


End file.
